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Thursday, August 28, 2008

MythBusters Tackle Moon Conspiracies: Behind the Scenes

On the eve of one of their biggest busts yet, PM contributing editors Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage explain how they made their own fake photos, built a moon set in an hour—and even went weightless themselves. No, they didn't build a rocket ship and actually go ... yet.

By Erin McCarthy

Ever sinceman went to the moon—and still today as America plans to go back (via DIY, NASA or the next president) —there have been those who said we never actually made it there in the first place. Instead, they say, the whole moon landing was a massive conspiracy perpetrated by NASA using elaborate sets and special effects. And they support their claims with what they believe to be irregularities in photography and film taken on the moon.

Sounds like a case for MythBusters and special-effects gurus Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, who take on the most popular lunar conspiracy theories tonight at 9 pm on the Discovery Channel with the help of a vintage NASA camera, a purpose-built rig and an airplane.

For Hyneman and Savage, taking on the moon landing conspiracy was a no-brainer. "They've been on our radar for a long time, because it's something everybody knows about, and it's not something you can go there yourself to check it out—at least not very easily," Hyneman told PM last week. "When we started to look into all the suspicions that were there, there was a lot of meat for us to dig into. Especially since it's sort of centered on special effects—that's our daily work, so we got into it." Though other people have tackled the moon conspiracy, "We felt that we couldn't put it to bed until we put our own stamp on it," Savage says.

After identifying conspiracy theories from several major categories, including faked photos and film footage, the duo began researching NASA's huge store of information, a challenge in and of itself. "NASA has been incredibly open-source about the missions to the moon, about every scrap of information down to the material in the astronaut's socks," Savage says. "So you have a tremendous amount of material to choose from to make sure that your replication is entirely accurate. We had probably a greater breadth of information than we usually have to achieve the replication. But that also means that you've got to be a little bit more picky, and choose carefully so that you're not overwhelming yourself with details that aren't actually germane to the myth you're doing."

Theorists claim that famous photos snapped on the moon have irregularities that prove a conspiracy—including shadows that don't run parallel (allegedly indicative of multiple light sources rather than the single source provided by the sun), and an illuminated astronaut standing in the shadow of the moon lander (theorists say that's impossible without a fill light). To see if they could duplicate the photos, Hyneman and Savage constructed a miniature model set—complete with a 1/76th-scale model of the lunar lander and portland cement mixed with black powder to mimic the moon's surface.

First, they looked at the parallel shadow photo, lighting the model's flat surface with a single source of light and taking a shot of the scene with a Hasselblad camera designed specifically for NASA's moon missions. Sure enough, the shadows were parallel—but the Mythbusters didn't stop there. When they added contours and topography to the model moon surface, then lit it with a light source, the shadows in the resulting photo looked far off parallel.

When Hyneman and Savage tested the second photograph, they built a larger lunar lander to fit a 1/6-size model of Neil Armstrong from Adam's collection, and mixed their own regolith, or moon powder, from portland cement and charcoal powder. That allowed them to duplicate the NASA photograph—no fill light necessary, because regolith is reflective. That's how we can see the moon at night: Sunlight bounces off the moon and back at us. Real regolith has a reflectivity index between 7 and 10 percent; the MythBusters' concoction had an albedo of 8 percent.

Though that was enough to consider the photo conspiracy busted, it also showed that models could be used to mimic the surface of the moon—a fact that didn't escape Hyneman and Savage. "They were looking at these little artifacts of these photographs of the moon landings and saying they were fake because of some little thing that they spotted," Hyneman says. "We weren't going in there saying that any particular thing is absolutely not possible to fake. We were going in and saying that what we were seeing wasn't necessarily faked based on the kinds of details that theorists point out as evidence that the photos were faked. We set up some camera lights and everything else that indicated a single-point source of light, as in the sun, and yes, you could have faked that shot, or yet, it could have actually been the real case, depending on the terrain." According to Hyneman, this testing went much more quickly than on a typical MythBusters show—it only took the team about an hour to build the moon set.Conspiracy theorists also claim that NASA faked the footage of the astronauts on the moon by filming them in a studio, then slowing down the film to mimic what movement would look like at moon's gravity (one-sixth of Earth's gravity). To test this third theory, Savage and Hyneman needed a bigger space than their shop, so they headed to the Alameda Naval Base. And, in typical MythBusters form, the first part of their trip was as much as fun as scientific: Savage put on a spacesuit costume from his personal collection (modified, of course, with some accurate details straight from NASA) then jumped, hopped and skipped while Jamie filmed him at 48 frames per second (fps). Next, they brought in a rig with a harness and bungee cords attached to a tracking system—built specifically for the test by Trapeze World—that would simulate the moon's gravity. After strapping in, Adam repeated the three movements while Jamie filmed him at 48 fps.

When they slowed down the footage to the regular 24 fps, they weren't impressed by what they found. While it was close, the slowed down footage wasn't an exact match with NASA's footage: The effort Adam needed to jump up and down moved his helmet in a way not seen in NASA's footage, and none of Adam's movements were quite as smooth as the astronauts'.

They could have stopped there, but Hyneman and Savage still weren't satisfied. So they suited up (Jamie, too!), added 180 pounds in chest and wrist weights and weight belts, then took to the air with ZeroG, a company that offers a weightless experience inside an airplane. To simulate the moon's gravity, the plane went into a series of parabolic arcs, as Savage was filmed at regular speed mimickiing the astronauts' movements. (Coming out of that weightlessness, the MythBusters say, was intense: You weigh twice what you do on Earth, a sensation Hyneman says felt "like your feet are going to climb out the top of your head.") And in that environment, he was able to accurately mimic the movements in NASA's footage. "That was the real feather in the cap in terms of making sure that we'd buttoned down every possible explanation," Savage says.

"And of course, we would have liked to button it down further by building our own rocket ship and going to the moon, but in general we only have about 10 days on the ground with an episode, and we figured we'd need at least two or three weeks to do that," Jamie laughs. (Both MythBusters say they'd go to the moon in a second—but building their own ship is part of the deal, as is building their own spacesuits. "I'd start with garbage bags and a lot of duct tape," Hyneman muses.)

Despite what they found, Savage doubts that anything on the show will have an effect on conspiracy theorists. "I think it's predictable what their stance will be: That we're just shills for the Man!" he laughs.

"We're not too out there to educate people about any specific thing necessarily so much as we are to encourage critical and scientific thinking," Hyneman says. "And regardless of whether conspiracy theorists are right or wrong in their conclusions, it's good to think carefully about what is told and what is out there and make up your own mind. That's all we are really pro: making sure that you just don't swallow everything that you're fed, and look at it clearly and critically."

The bottom line, Savage insists, is that we went to the moon. "The fact is, science isn't about coming up with the ultimate truth," he says, "because there is no such thing. It's about looking at the evidence and coming to conclusions. And if a conspiracy theorist wants to come to the most complicated possible conclusion based on the evidence, what we've done in this episode is shown that in fact going to the moon is a simpler solution than the conspiracy theory. And given Occam's razor and general scientific principle, that's the most likely explanation for all the evidence we have that we went to the moon: that we actually did."

To find out if a flag can wave in a vacuum—and if you can actually make a defined footprint in a place where there's no water vapor, and how a giant laser proves that we were on the moon—tune in to MythBusters tonight at 9 pm on the Discovery Channel.